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WhatsApp, Wye? 3

July 1, 2016 — July 31, 2016

Hypothesis

If we were all connected via the mobile app, WhatsApp, then we’d be able to quickly share updates and videos that others would read and watch.

Design

Tell all of Wye River about WhatsApp. Encourage people to join the group, but do it organically — if they request it, or if someone sees them one-on-one and encourages it. See if, at minimum, they share updates and (epic) videos with each other.

Metrics

WhatsApp engagement:

Who posts, when, and how frequently?

Who’s posting video or photos?

Who’s already using it? Who wants to join our group? Who installs it to join?

Learnings

Ide mentioned WhatsApp organically and one-on-one to George and Angelica, and both wanted in! Helping them install WhatsApp and getting them on the Wye River group proved challenging, but we learned a lot about how to simplify this.

Three leaders posted (Ev, May, Angelica) for a total of five posts in July. All were responses to Miles River messages.

We currently aren’t tracking who reads Miles Rivers messages. It’s a highly manual process, but it’s possible, and traffic is light, so we should do this. We should also use link trackers to see who’s clicking on links from WhatsApp versus other mediums.

Decisions

People seem to like it, and the organic method of recruiting people to it seems to work well. We should do another iteration of the experiment, but number of posts isn’t a hugely relevant stat for us right now. We should instead focus on the following metrics:

How many times do leaders share anything on their own (i.e. not in response to one of us)?

How many times do leaders share video takeaways from one-on-one conversations on their own?

We had a dramatic decrease in traffic from June to July (from 31 to 5 messages posted). Angelica and May posted once, and Ev posted three times. (Remember, this is messages posted by leaders. It doesn’t count content posted by Miles River.)

As @eden has already articulated in her updates, we had two folks request to be added (George and Angelica), and in both cases, we ran into challenges getting them installed. We were able to get Angelica up thanks to her assistant, and we’re still working with George’s assistant.

Alison Lin
11:09 am on August 15, 2016

Thanks for this update @eugene. I’m looking forward to seeing what we learn from this next iteration.

At the WyeRiver meeting in March 2016, Wye leaders decided to sharpen their focus and come together to do long term planning together. There was strong consensus that in order to succeed, the network must try working in different shapes and move forward their work in between the two annual meetings.

This “how might we”question and the associated experiments are testing out different methods for communicating what work is happening and prompting increased engagement.

#Whatsapp3 Adding Angelica to Whatsapp was more difficult that we’d thought adding folks would be. Lesson learned that should have assistants and/or principals add the app and then message Eugene on Whatsapp, immediately. Easy lesson learned since Areli was so helpful! #whatsapp3